Hi Reader,

I am in swizzle purgatory.

In the last three months, I’ve spent more than thirty hours on the ice learning to skate. I joined an adult Learn to Skate class, and alongside eight other students, I’ve been learning the basics of moving on the ice.

One of the first moves we learned is the swizzle. You push your feet apart, glide forward, and then pull your legs back together again. Like this:

It feels like I have been swizzling nonstop for thirty hours. And I am torn.

I want to master the fundamental movements of skating. I want to ingrain excellent technique into my muscle memory. I want to excel at the most basic moves, to lay a rock-solid foundation on which to build every future skill.

And also, I want to move on from swizzles. So, so, so badly. I want to do everything but a swizzle. I feel like I’ve gotten the hang of it well enough already, and please can’t we try literally anything else?

Sometimes, class feels grating, like it’s holding me back. Yes, locking my knees at the apex of the swizzle is one of the fundamental aspects of technique I’m here to master. But also, I practiced that for eight hours last week; do I really need to wait for my coach to explain it again to someone in class who still hasn’t gotten it?

Then again, this week, my coach showed us how it’s possible to swizzle forward and backward, one foot at a time, and draw a flower on the ice. And I was reminded:

Yes, I’ve spent thirty hours this summer practicing my swizzles. I feel like I’ve mastered them, and I’m fighting an urge to race ahead.

And yes, there’s more for me to learn, even within the humble swizzle. Every minute I spend pushing the boundaries of what my swizzle can do is a minute well spent, a minute that’s preparing me for possibilities I can’t even imagine yet.

And . . . I see this same tension in my writers every day.

In Story Refinery, I coach writers through revising one scene at a time. We hop on Zoom and spend over an hour unpacking the most granular nuances of a single scene:

Why does it exist in the story?

What’s the arc?

What’s the structure, the build of action and choices?

How does the character feel at the start of the scene?

How do they feel at the end?

Why does that matter to the story as a whole?

What details will make the reader feel those feelings, too?

And given all that, what changes might the writer explore as they revise it before our next call?

Some scenes are straightforward, and we move through them in one call.

Others are tough nuts to crack. We’ll workshop them, the writer will revise, we’ll workshop again, revise, workshop again, revise again.

By the end of that third pass, our third Zoom call finessing the minutiae of the same scene, the writer is ready to move on.

They, like me, are done with swizzles that scene. They see the satisfying progress that scene has made. And they see the dozens of scenes still to come, all the pages still waiting for revision, and they can’t wait to press forward, to the next scene and the next.

I see their progress, too, and the mountain of scenes to come.

And yet . . . I also see still-untapped opportunities to etch roses in the ice.

To make every page more masterful, more unputdownable. To create even more emotional resonance and plot-driving power in every line.

And I want to stay. To draw out every last drop of possibility hiding between each word.

And so we compromise. After three passes on one scene, we move forward—acknowledging that the writer will continue building skills through all the revision to come, and the work we do in later scenes will unlock ideas they’ll bring back to refine this scene months down the line.

This is the normal progression of skill development. The constant tension between the urge to move forward . . .

. . . and the invitation to dig in, through one more pass, then another, and another.

To mine the depths of opportunity that are available only to those with the patience, the determination, the grit to return to words they’ve revised a dozen times before . . .

. . . and refine them to excellence.

So this week, you’ll find me on the ice, practicing my swizzles once again.

And I invite you to seek out the untapped potential in your scenes.

Happy editing,

Alice

P.S. Want to hear what it sounds like to find the hidden opportunities to refine a scene? In the Scene Workshop episodes of the Your Next Draft podcast, you get to be a fly on the wall as I coach writers through revising a scene. Hear how I help writers level up the opening scenes of a contemporary drama and a high fantasy novel.